The Happening is Not Happening

M. Night Shyamalan’s film The Happening is one of the most innovative films I’ve ever seen. It is in no way your traditional horror film. It does not feature some creepy villain that refuses to die. It does not have bloody body parts flying across the screen, and it is not scary at all. When I went to see this film, I was expecting something frightening or at least something intense and shocking like The Sixth Sense. However, I spent the majority of my time in the theater laughing out loud. The film is geared more towards an introspective, philosophical audience than one wanting to be scared silly. It stars Mark Wahlburg and Zoey Deschanel who play a couple trying to avoid a gas released by plants that makes you kill yourself when you breath it in. Yes, flowers are the bad guys in this movie. Bet you would of never seen that coming. M. Night Shyamalan probably intended for audiences to be afraid of the concept of losing all self control, but when you first realize the bad guys are plants, it’s hard to think that deeply. The film does have some very memorable moments. For example, a scene early on in the movie shows people walking down a street when suddenly it starts raining construction workers. The construction workers had been working on a skyscraper prior to inhaling suicide gas. The movie has a lot of suspenseful moments leading up to big let downs. You spend what seems like an eternity waiting for a lawn mower to run over a man that has flung himself down in it’s path. Right before the lawn mower reaches the man, the scene ends. Perhaps Shyamalan wanted to make it clear The Happening is a thought provoking movie and not a blood bath, but it seemed pointless to spend so long waiting for a lawn mower to amble across a yard and not see any blood at all. The movie tries to explain the strange behavior of the plants by saying that the plants are releasing the deadly gas as a self-defense mechanism; The plants are poisoning us because we wasteful humans have been poisoning them. Shyamalan was trying to make a very clever movie and succeeded in being creative but failed in making anything truly worth watching. In short, it was a good attempt, but the movie turned out to be as lame as the title of this blog post.